Communications by electronic mail (email), once a luxury, are now a modem necessity. Current email storage systems store email for a large number of users on a single computer. If this single computer fails, a large number of those users cannot access their email. After the failure, a recovery process must be put in place to restore a large amount of email related data in the storage system of the single computer. The recovery process requires down time of the single computer which can be too lengthy to be acceptable to the email users of an email service. An absence of redundancy in email related data in the storage system prevents robust error recovery and permits one or more single points of failure in the architecture of the storage system. However, for very large volume email processing systems, redundancy must be accomplished in as efficient a manner as possible.
Accordingly, there is a continuing need for an improved email service.